


Follow Me Into The Dark

by somedamfrenchfries



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Anxiety, Blood, Bulimia, Depressing, Depression, Eating Disorders, I apparently write because I want everyone to cry so that's what this is, Implied abuse, M/M, One-Shot, Panic Attacks, Really depressing, Sad, Sad Ending, Sad everyone, Second chapter is an alternate ending (happy-ish), Self-Harm, Suicide, lance pov, semi-poetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 00:38:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12900237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somedamfrenchfries/pseuds/somedamfrenchfries
Summary: He met her in the bathroom, vomiting until she couldn’t breathe, with her own insides trailing from her lips.He met him in the staircase, falling to pieces as the air was sucked from his lungs and demons from shadows that no one else could see crawled all over him.He met her on the roof, bleeding her heart from a thousand cuts on her arms and losing her soul from a thousand more scars.He met him in the kitchen, hiding his limp with an oversized apron and hiding in the darkness of the closet when he had nothing more to give.He met him in the shadows outside the last light that had not died, with a noose in one hand and a knife in the other.He lost himself in the dark, after everyone else had gone.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> So, quick warning, this fic involves eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, blood, anxiety, panic attacks, implied abuse, and a ton of depression. It's very angsty and the ending is depressing. I may do an alternate ending because I wasn't really sure how I wanted it to end, so I'll probably put that up fairly soon if I decide to do it (comment if you want it or not as well, if you have an opinion). I wrote this in a semi-poetic type of style, I think? It's pretty abstract, so if you're confused, you're sort of meant to be? Not totally, but it's not supposed to be super clear. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, leave comments or kudos if it warrants it, and thank you for reading.

~Allura~

 

He met her in the bathroom, vomiting until she couldn’t breathe, with her own insides trailing from her lips. 

 

High school was hard. The interminable, lonely days were passed with a lowered head, hurrying his lanky limbs through the hall and pretending he could not hear the jeering calls, the savage, sneering faces, pretending each word was not another needle carving another infinitesimal cut across his skin. 

He took refuge in the bathroom today, leaning against the cold tile and staring into the blinding lights above him, wondering idly if they would begin to look like a light at the end of this hellish tunnel if he only looked at them long enough. 

It took moments for him to notice the sound of retching bouncing off the faded walls. Slowly, he pushed off from the wall, footsteps light, impermanent, as he made his way toward the stalls, hardly more substantial, more alive, than a ghost. 

A girl was on her knees in the second stall, bent over the toilet. As he approached, she looked up, lips smeared with vomit. Her hands rested on the toilet seat, and she didn’t move as she gazed back at him with clear, crystalline blue eyes. Her white hair was tied back, chocolate skin gleaming incongruously beneath the sharp glare of the cold fluorescents above them. 

It may have been seconds or years before he spoke. 

All he could muster was a feeble, “Why the boy’s bathroom?” 

“Girls judge,” she responded, voice hoarse and gravelly from the force of her retching. “Boys just don’t care.” 

Her hands were rough with calluses, her lips dry and cracked, and her eyes were red with blood. She was broken, but that was okay, because so was he. 

Wordlessly, he offered her a hand. One was smeared with filth. She gave him the other. It was coarse, like the rasp of her voice, like the shrinking path they both walked every day. 

He walked her to the sinks, where she cleaned her hands and face, rinsing her secret down into the dark where no one would ever find it. 

They left the school together, hand in hand as they made their way home beneath the lowering gray sky. 

 

~Shiro~

 

He met him in the staircase, falling to pieces as the air was sucked from his lungs and demons from shadows that no one else could see crawled all over him. 

 

He had begun to wander the halls after school, a phantom drifting lifelessly across the grimy linoleum. It was not peaceful, but it was quiet, and in the quiet, he could think. 

The stairwells were dark and gray, entombed by unforgiving steel doors. This is where he went when even the silent white corridors would not grant him relief, and that is where he went today. 

He knew immediately that he was not alone. A gasp, a small sob, the scuffing of a shoe against the floor. Their echoes bounced hollowly through the stairwell, broken cries of long-forgotten souls trapped in a cage of concrete and steel answering this new anguish. 

Halfway down the flight, a boy was sitting slumped against the wall. A senior, he must have been. Muscled, with black hair cropped close on the sides but falling over his face. The white bangs almost hid the tears tracking down his face, the wild eyes flicking this way and that. 

Panicked breaths came heavy and fast, the boy’s chest moving too quickly to be healthy. Fear carved the lines of his face into something strained and painful. 

Lance crouched down before him, reaching toward his hands. His fingers were clenched so tight, too tight around each other, fingers turning violent shades of purple and white. There was fright in the strength of his grip. 

The boy jerked when Lance touched him, but as Lance’s long fingers stroked the sides of his face, worked his aching fingers apart, smoothed his hair, his tense body went limp, his breathing became slow. His eyes fell shut, and he fought the demons the rest of the way back into their cages. 

They walked together to the parking lot, where damp asphalt absorbed their footsteps like jacket sleeves absorbed tears. Shiro drove him home, and then he left, dissolving into the rain so completely that the whole afternoon might have been a dream. 

 

~Pidge~

 

He met her on the roof, bleeding her heart from a thousand cuts on her arms and losing her soul through a thousand more scars. 

 

The access door to the roof was supposed to be locked, but it never was. The stairs, no more inviting than the grave-like stairwells used by the students, seemed hollow and forlorn, coated in dust that no one seemed inclined to wipe away. 

He climbed these stairs a few times a week these days. There was something in putting his feet to the edge and staring down at the ground four stories below that drew him back, even when a small part of him was whispering of things left behind. 

Today, someone had beat him there. 

There was blood on the jacket in her lap. Her legs were thin, bird-like and frail but so strong beneath the white fabric covering them. Her arms, too, were skinny, but unlike her legs, they were cut open and leaking her life into a ragged hoodie. 

The cuts were shallow. Not meant to kill, just to relieve her of her thoughts. Just for a little while. 

Her short hair ruffled in the wind as he floated over and lowered himself down beside her. 

For once, he did not break the silence. Instead, she spoke first. “Hell of a place to be at three PM on a Friday.” 

He huffed something that maybe, in another life, could have been a laugh. “I use the roof to make friends,” he deadpanned. 

She opened her eyes at last. They were a pale brown, but in the dim gray light they looked lifeless and bleak, not colorless but with such a manner that they might as well be. Like his. 

Lifting pale arms that poured crimson vitality like water, she said, “Wonderful friends you must find here.” 

“I have a way of attracting broken people,” he said casually, turning his eyes to the horizon. “I’ve decided to lean into it and see where it takes me.” 

She hummed thoughtfully. When he looked back at her, she had dipped her fingers in the blood waterfalling down her skin and begun tracing old scars. She had thousands of them. 

They sat in silence as the skies opened up and the rain began to pour down. 

 

~Hunk~

 

He met him in the kitchen, hiding his limp with an oversized apron and hiding in the darkness of the closet when he had nothing more to give. 

 

Noise was so rare in the silence of these halls after hours, and so loud- so loud that there were times when he could not resist following the sound in the hope that maybe there would be something, anything, anything at the end of the road that might save him. 

He didn’t find anything to save him in the abrupt crash of pots and pans on the tile floor, or the sense of jarring as he watched another pot clatter to the ground. 

A large boy in a yellow t-shirt lunged after them, anxiety written on his face. He did not notice Lance watching from the doorway as he scurried to clean up the kitchen, a cook scolding him in a language that sounded Eastern European. As the boy hurried toward the mess on the floor, his leg caught, and Lance watched him limp several paces before the boy disguised it again. He caught the edge of a bruise as his sleeves rode up, saw another violent splash of purple hiding beneath the strap of his oversized white apron. 

Lance could see anxiety contorting the boy’s face. He scrambled to pick up the kitchenware to the dissonant screaming of the cook still scrubbing dishes at another sink. The screaming didn’t stop until long after every pot and pan had been picked up and placed back in its proper location. 

The cook went back to cleaning and the boy resumed his chores, but Lance could see him shaking. A severe limp seemed to be worsening by the minute, poorly disguised by an apron that brushed the tops of the boy’s shoes and wrapped almost all the way around his body. 

When the cook was no longer paying attention, the boy glanced furtively this way, that, and slunk away. He opened a door, vanishing behind it. 

He did not reappear for a long time, long enough that the cook left- probably to smoke. Lance, once sure she was gone, scurried into the kitchen and cracked open the door that the boy had vanished behind. 

The boy in yellow was sitting in the corner of a closet, on the floor, with hands clenched over his ears and tears streaming down his face and breaths shaking. He was trembling violently, fingers turning red, purple, blue, white as he clutched painfully at his hair. Eyes darted wildly behind closed lids. 

Lance crouched in front of him, reaching out. 

The boy opened his eyes. Behind them, Lance saw fear. 

Their gazes locked, and between them, there was an understanding. 

Offering his hand, Lance helped the boy to his feet, and together, they limped from the kitchen and beyond the concrete cage they both had been confined to. 

 

~Keith~

 

He met him in the shadows outside the last light that had not died, with a noose in one hand and a knife in the other. 

 

He rarely ventured into the theater. Its vast stage, its empty, echoing space… it felt so hollow. Too close to how he felt inside for comfort. It was cold and strange there, somewhere that, unlike the halls, he couldn’t seem to find the relief that he spent so much of his little remaining energy seeking. 

Today, idle feet carried him along again, disconnected from his thoughts. He found himself entering from backstage. He stopped when he saw what was waiting for him. 

Several of the lights hanging from the scaffolding were broken. Shattered, maybe, or just dead, blackened and snuffed out due to some invisible decay. Whatever it was, only one remained, shining near the center of the stage. 

It did not seem real as he stared at the boy standing beneath the spotlight, looking up toward the light with a noose clutched in one hand and a knife in the other. 

The boy didn’t acknowledge Lance’s presence hovering just off-stage. As if in a dream, Lance drifted forward, toward where the boy still had not moved. 

Inky black hair darker than the night sky gleamed in the harsh light, outdated in style but somehow serving to aid the melancholy. A dead man walking, a ghost- impermanent, insubstantial. 

A look into the boy’s violet eyes, still trained on the light far above, told him what he needed to know. 

“Why the theater?” Lance asked, softly. Nearly a whisper, achingly gentle. Still, the sound carried, bouncing ethereally around them. He did not like it. It was far too fitting. It was like they were already dead. Perhaps they were. 

After a long moment, the boy replied, “I’ve never been in drama, don’t know anyone who has or is.” His eyes still had not strayed, in their seemingly infinite intensity, from the light above. “No one that I know will have to be the one to find me.” 

His words echoed on the still air for several long seconds after they had rolled off his tongue. 

“Why a knife and a noose?” he asked, even more quietly. Still, the words echoed. 

“I haven’t decided which to use yet,” the boy replied, his voice as soft and just as aching. 

Slowly, Lance reached out a hand. “Then not yet,” he offered. “Not today.” 

Finally, the boy broke away from the light. Lance had not yet seen him blink. Violet eyes met his, and unlike the girl’s, unlike his, they did not look faded. They were the brightest he had ever seen, glimmering stars gracing the surface of the earth in the heartrendingly beautiful face of a dying angel. 

Hair like the silky night sky, eyes like infinite, shining stars. The face of heaven on earth, salvation suffering. 

Without looking away, the boy let his noose fall to the floor and placed his hand in Lance’s, cold fingers wrapping around warm, honeyed hands. 

“Not today,” he echoed. 

Together, they left, out into the dark night with a knife tucked into the waistband of black jeans and a noose slung over defeated shoulders. 

 

~Him~

 

He lost himself in the dark, after everyone else had gone. 

 

Pink, Black, Green, Yellow, Red. He had named them each after a color- Blue for himself, like the ocean, like his mama’s eyes, like the colors he dreamed at night- because when they were together, they created something beautiful, almost hopeful. 

But one by one they had faded, dissolving into thin air. Succumbing to the weight of the world, giving in to the inevitable. They left him alone, one by one. Sucking the hope from him, one color at a time. 

Red curled around him beneath thin blankets, making him warm where before was only cold. A hand stroked his cheek, his hair, whispered words and glimmering eyes delivering love and affection. He fell asleep in the embrace of the last of his hope, wrapped in the solace of the night sky, in the arms and broken wings of an angel dying on the inside. He fell asleep with love in his ear. 

He woke in the night as weight shifted, as he felt one last caress of his hair, another whispered mantra of “I love you,” whispered truths. 

But no, it was just a dream. 

When he awoke, his bed was empty and his skin was cold. 

They found his angel, his night sky, his Red, in a pool of crimson beside the airport, with a picture of Blue clutched in his fingers and the words, “I’m sorry. I love you. You’re better off without me” written on torn notebook paper. 

He secluded himself, locking the door and closing the window. Tears stained his pillow and soaked the cold sheets that once were warm. Slowly, he succumbed. The weight of the world had pressed on him for so long, and now his last reason, his biggest reason, to stay was gone. Faded away into the dark, like the rest. 

For so long, he had wanted to fade too. Just like they had. And now, somehow, he was the last left. 

It was his turn. 

He would follow. His rainbow. His angel, night sky, broken wings. He would follow. 

He climbed to the roof, where the blood had been cleaned away and the birds dared not land when blackness laid so thick about the place. 

He tasted the sky as he fell like a star to the surface of the earth. 

And there, finally, he found his peace.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate ending. It's short and pretty similar to the original ending, but definitely more light-hearted- the happy ending. Personally, I don't have an ending I think is "right"- I was torn between the two and decided to put the sadder version on the original chapter solely because it was the one I wrote first. I can see using this as the ending-ending and calling the ending in the "first chapter" a dream, or simply using this one as the actual alternate ending- or, if you prefer, just sticking with the original sad ending. It really just comes down to personal preference, but hopefully this chapter will be comforting to those of you who were severely depressed by the first ending. Thanks for taking the time to read!

Him

 

He found himself in the dark, after everyone else had gone. 

 

Pink, Black, Green, Yellow, Red. He had named them each after a color- Blue for himself, like the ocean, like his mama’s eyes, like the colors he dreamed at night- because when they were together, they created something beautiful, almost hopeful. 

But one at a time, they had gone away. Faded into the dark, dissolved into the air. Leaving him, one by one. 

They were all gone now, all but one, and him. Blue and Red, all that remained. 

Red curled protectively around him beneath thin blankets, making him warm where before was only cold. A hand stroked his cheek, his hair, whispered words and glimmering eyes delivering love and affection. He fell asleep in the embrace of what had finally begun to bring bag his hope, his life; wrapped in the solace of the night sky, in the arms and broken wings of an angel dying- and now, slowly healing- on the inside. He fell asleep with love in his ear. 

When he awoke, it was to soft lips at his neck, gentle fingers on his face. Sleepy violet eyes smiled down at him, alive- alive- with love and with the light that they had been unable to find for themselves but had somehow hunted down for each other. 

Far away, a knife, a noose, and a pair of linoleum- worn Converse decayed in a mountain of garbage, of lost and forgotten things. 

His angel, his night sky, pulled him closer, strong arms holding him tightly. He was warm now, and the world had color, had light, had hope. 

Smiling, he nestled closer to Red and relaxed. 

Finally, he had time.


End file.
